President Trump: Listen up!
On June 9, 1954 a soft-spoken attorney named Joseph N. Welch unexpectedly took on the country’s most powerfully dangerous political bully and shut him down.
The incident landed in the political history books.
A few chosen words unleashed in a politically charged U.S. Senate room — caught 66 years ago on blurred black and white TV — ended the reign of Republican U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had lied and bullied his way to power; heaping the lives and careers of innocent people on his pyre of communist conspiracy.
“Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch said to McCarthy.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Welch added.
This time McCarthy was stunned into silence. Wild applause from an audience erupted. His malignant career was over; dying three years later censured, alcoholic and alone.
It seems to me this nation needs to concentrate on unification and governance of the country from the outside in.
It’s also a sure bet Trump will continue to spread his poisonous invective and the nation may be due a McCarthy moment; a Goliath encounter with a biblical David in a public political slapdown.
And it’s pretty obvious Trump has no shame.
And apparently no one to shame him.
No one to deflate the buffoon.
The podium poison Trump unleashed Thursday night at the White House claiming the vote counts were illegal in states where his numbers were diminishing was shocking.
The president’s pitch sounded like a signal to his “troops” to release the bombs; position the bangalores; take down the exit sign at the White House and bar the door because he doubts America’s prized federal election system.
Welch’s profile in courage in the McCarthy era was executed when millions of jittery Americans feared communists had invaded our society. It was a jittery America in the early 1950’s.
It’s quite a story. Pull up a chair.
A Republican senator from Wisconsin, McCarthy’s career was on a meteoric rise while conducting his witch hunt for communists known as the “Red Scare.”
Claiming hundreds of “known communists” worked for the State Department, McCarthy was on a red-baiting crusade resulting in destroyed lives; Hollywood film careers and incarcerations for refusing to cooperate with his probe.
Attorney Joseph Welch
UPI
In June 1954 — when his career was ebbing, McCarthy took on the U.S. Army for being “soft” on communists. Welch, representing the Army, had managed to blunt charges lobbed by an angry McCarthy screaming “Point of Order!” repeatedly as he hammered a table.
But when McCarthy claimed a young associate in Welch’s law firm had been a long-time member of an organization that was a “legal arm of the Communist Party,” Welch calmly shot back.
Welch’s message was simple. He gauged McCarthy as cruel and reckless and asked if he had no shame … no sense of decency.
The cameras rolled; McCarthy roiled and it didn’t help legendary U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower was now the new president.
In 1959, Welch starred as a judge in the legendary American courtroom crime drama “Anatomy of a Murder” directed by Otto Preminger and shot in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Actors James Stewart and George C. Scott may have led the film credits, but the soft-spoken Welch stole the show.
So here’s the question.
Mr. President:
Have you no shame?
Sneedlings . . .
Saturday birthdays: David Guetta, 53; Bethany Mota, 25; and Joni Mitchell, 77. . . . Sunday birthdays: Gordon Ramsay, 54; SZA, 31; and Lauren Alaina, 26.
